


Fragile Like I’ve Never Seen (You’re Pretty When You Do Not Speak).

by everybodyhasroots



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Daryl being a dad, Episode: s10e04 Silence the Whisperers, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Lydia Deserves Better, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26108110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everybodyhasroots/pseuds/everybodyhasroots
Summary: After she is attacked in Alexandria, Lydia remembers things she’d rather try and forget.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon & Lydia
Comments: 9
Kudos: 26





	Fragile Like I’ve Never Seen (You’re Pretty When You Do Not Speak).

**Author's Note:**

> Additional trigger warning - although the noncon in this story is not particularly graphic, it’s very much implied and if you’re at all sensitive to that I wouldn’t recommend reading. Title is from ‘Too Close’ by Sir Chloe.
> 
> Stay safe lovelies!!

After - when they take Negan away, and her vision begins to go blurry, and Daryl and Siddiq carry her to the infirmary - Lydia’s mind wanders.

Gage and Margo and Alfred. She tests their names in her head. They’d been perfect strangers not so long ago. She’d tried so hard, dressing like them and walking like them and talking like them. She was learning to read, to garden, to cook. To talk above a whisper, to shake the guardian-like slouch from her body when she walked, to clean herself with hot water. She trains with Henry’s staff and eats lunch with Daryl and talks to Negan as he picks tomatoes. But of course, it hadn’t been enough.

How stupid she is, to think that it would. 

They corner her in the dark, surrounding and pressing in as she turns, stupid and slow, like a squirrel jumping straight into a snare. And when Margo lands the first blow, cracking across her face with her own staff, and Alfred gets a hold of her arms and yanks her back down to the ground when she tries to get up, suddenly she is somewhere else entirely. 

And - God, how old had she been when it first started? Thirteen? Fourteen? She can't remember that first night too clearly - there are flashes, static, smells and sounds that whip past her in a flurry of vicious wind. She doesn't remember the pain, strangely, but she remembers the wet earth slimy under the skin on her face and hands, and the sweat, the grunts, the callused hands vice-like on her wrists, holding her down, the rustling of the others, gathered in a circle to watch like curious forest animals, eyes glittering blankly out from behind their masks. And most vividly of all, she remembers the eyes of her mama, chips of hard flint in a cold, expressionless face, above a mouth of hard iron. She'd screamed, Lydia recalled vaguely. When she'd seen her mama, she thought she was saved, thought the man on her would be dead by morning and she could wear his skin for a face - but her mama hadn't moved, and - and he had, and it-

She squeezes her eyes shut. The infirmary is dimly lit, but she knows the doctor - what's his name, again? - can see her face. Slick with sweat and tears and blood from the gash on her temple that's making her vision tilt wildly every so often. He's bandaging up her forearm, which is also bleeding, she supposes, though she can't feel it - that whole left arm is numb from where Gage stamped on her shoulder with the crushing hard rubber of his gardening boot. She can still feel their hands on her arms, her calves, gripping tight, holding her down. When Alfred had yelled that out - "hold her down!" she's shrieked, writhing, her eyes rolling like a frenzied animal - surely they wouldn't, they couldn't, Margo was right there, she wouldn't let that happen, she must know how scared she was-

Something shifts - Lydia is taken swiftly back to the present, the dark infirmary room that smells like dust and disinfectant. The doctor - Dante - has taken his hands off her arm, thank God, because she can feel the skin tingling like static electricity where his fingers where - and there is a new figure in the doorway. She glimpses broad shoulders, shaggy hair and a distinctly male stature thar sends her heart jackhammering in panic again, before he steps forward and the lamplights cast his face into soft relief. Eyebrows, turned up at the front in concern above dark eyes that flick from the gash on her forehead to her legs hanging off the chair, shaking like a leaf.

Daryl steps closer, slowly, like he’s approaching a flighty animal. _We’re animals. Animals live out here..._ His eyes are shadowed, his mouth a thin line, and she can see pity carved into the age lines of his face. It’s what breaks her, she thinks. The sobs that she’d been holding tight and sore in her throat are ripped from her, and her hands skitter up her arms and hair, nails digging into the skin, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Dante slip quietly away, and Daryl close the distance between them. He catches a hold of her wrist, so gently like he’s so scared of hurting her, pulls her away from the scratches on her skin, and pulls her to him, hesitantly. She cries until she’s hoarse, breathing in his smell of sweat and leather. The scent and his soft strength reminds her so strongly of her dad that she cries even harder, cries until she feels like she’s been scraped out from the inside, and Daryl holds her close and strokes her hair, and she thinks maybe he’s crying too, in the dim light where it’s safe and nobody can see but her.

It feels like hours before she pulls away, wiping the remnants of her tears with a rough shirt sleeve. 

“Are you okay?” Daryl asks her, in that low voice of his that cracks when’s he’s trying to make it soft and kind. She nods, jerkily. Wonders whether to tell him. She thinks it’s the kind of thing your parents are supposed to help you with, but her own mama had stood by and watched it happen with stone eyes. She’s lay there all night after it happened, skin feverish despite the autumn chill, tracing shapes into the mud, clenching damp leaves into shreds. When she moved for the first time after it happened, shaking and aching with tear tracks cracking on her cheeks, her mother was there, in the same spot, watching her with the same face, her eyes like blue ice in the cold dawn light. Her mama had stroked her hair with hands like talons and gripped her bruised wrists tight, whispering harshly into her ear, cruel nonsense she didn’t understand. “It’s to make you strong, bug,” she’d breathed. “Out here now, we have to live like animals, and this is how animals live. They take the weak and the small, until the weak and the small fight back.”

She used to think that was true - but knows the truth, now. Her mama liked seeing her hurt. She liked being the reason she was hurt. There was no logic, human or animal, behind it. Her mother was simply a woman who came alive in violence.

Daryl is different. His hands are callused like the cruel men she knew, and his glare is deep and dark, but he is soft, too, warm and kind in a way she hasn’t felt since her own father. And so she tells him. Haltingly, in barely above a whisper. Not all of it. She doesn’t tell him about mama’s words, or the acidic shame that had curdled in her stomach afterward. But enough for his fists to clench so hard his knuckles go white, and for his dark eyes to appear brighter in the dim light. He takes a seat next to her, hesitantly. For a while there is silence, save for her shuddering breaths, and then he takes her hand.

“I’m never gon’ let anything like that happen to you again,” he tells her, and maybe she’s a fool but she believes it. She believes in this ragged, dark, sad man. Maybe because they were the words she’d been waiting to hear from her own mama’s mouth for _years_ , or maybe because it was just what her dad would say, but she believes him. She twists her hand to grip his tighter, and drops her head onto his shoulder, feeling his reassuring strength under her cheek, and closes her eyes.

“I know.”


End file.
